 Good afternoon everyone welcome back to the afternoon session for the inclusive communication symposium I'm Amy Shen I'm the provost at OIST I also have been a professor at OIST for almost 10 years and my research areas in microfluidics lab on chip devices and biotechnology and so it's my great pleasure to introduce the two very special keynote speakers in the first session of you know the first group of the session this afternoon and so they're both from HHMI so for those of you who do not this abbreviation so it's a Howard Hughes Medical Institute based in in the US and so we have two speakers the first speaker so it's my great honor to welcome Dr. Laura Bonetta as a keynote speaker so she is the senior director for the bio interactive program at HHMI and she's also an adjunct professor of biology at Howard Community College so her work embodies HHMI's mission of advancing science for humanities benefits through bio interactive so which leads the charge in making authentic science accessible to students and researchers and so by providing this really unique high quality and narrative driven educational resources and professional development and for life science instructors and so this bio interactive program really ensures that science teaching is engaging inclusive and also relevant across very diverse educational landscapes so Laura's academic credentials include so she had her graduate studies at University of Toronto so I assume you are Canadian maybe and also she performed her post-out research in London and after which she actually made a major shift from fundamental laboratory research to science communication and which is very very important and her contribution as a writer and editor have influenced many high-profile science journals and National Institute of Health publications so which shows the commitment her commitment to utilize evidence based science education communication to really impact the society in a positive manner so Laura welcome we look forward to your lecture thank you so much for that introduction and thank you everyone for being here and the folks who organized this symposium and also wanted to thank my fellow presenters for your talks I've learned a lot over these two days so I'll be presenting oh and thank you Kathy Takayama for inviting extending the invitation it's my first time in Japan very excited to be here and so I'll be presenting with my colleague Vick Sivanathan so the title of our presentation today is inclusive communication in the science classroom and we will be telling you about two programs of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute so what does it what does inclusive communication mean when we're talking about the classroom so I'm assuming most of you have been have been in a science classroom either as students or teachers at some point in your lives maybe here in another country so in the United States when a student goes to university you have to select a major area of study so it can be history literature science is for students select science is a major for their study then you have to take the first year a lot of different science classes of chemistry and also biology so introductory biology and that's what we Vick and I think about so the typical introductory biology class in the United States it's usually two parts there's a lecture part which is 75% of the grade so it's a bigger it's worth more and then the lab so you do lab research that's usually 25% of your grade now if you're in a typical lecture what happens in the lecture so kind of what I'm doing now the professor is standing in front of the class you're all the students and I'm telling you what I think you need to know because I have all the knowledge and so I don't even know what questions you have you know I might ask you questions just to test your knowledge and then you're either right or wrong in the lab it's a bit different because I'm not talking as much but I decide what you will do you have to follow these steps and that's how your lab experience so it's very much one-way communication so it's coming from me to you so everything we heard the first day and today that's not inclusive communication right when it's one way so how do why does that matter we if you're a scientist you went through that process you did fine but what is the problem so we know from a number of studies that have been done that when students at least this is in the United States students who enter start university thinking I want to graduate in a STEM major so STEM stands for science technology engineering or math so all these sort of math science type subjects so if students go to university saying I want to major in STEM only about between 30 and 40 percent of students will actually graduated with a STEM course and so most students will leave their major they switch to another major and that's even more true for students from marginalized groups in science so women more even more women drop out of their STEM major in their first or second year of undergraduate peer stands for persons excluded because of their ethnicity and race so in the United States more black Latina and that of a native American students will drop out of their STEM major than non-peer students and then students are a first generation so they're the first students in their family to go to college more likely to drop out of STEM so and the reasons that a lot of students when they're asked why they changed majors is that because the content in their biology class is not relevant or in their STEM class the classroom climate did not feel welcoming and they have poor interaction with faculty so as an educator I have a lot of control over these things I have a lot of control over the climate in my classroom and how I interact with my students so that's kind of the good news if you teach so what does it take to change that experience so the students are not leaving STEM right at the beginning these are students who want to pursue a STEM major so it requires re-envisioning the role of educators how we think of educators not so much as giving you know that my role is giving you knowledge but engaging you in this two-way communication I'm going to show you a short video and Natalie the first day you talked about what you talked about how important awareness is and I think as an educator being aware of your identity and how you're interacting with students and why you're teaching and what you want to accomplish is really important so in this video you hear faculty talking about some of these questions how they would be teaching if I gave you 10 seconds to finish the statement I teach because what would come up for you what would you think what would you write how will you be intentional in your spaces how will you cultivate social belonging are you teaching to test or teaching to transform until you have to think about it you don't think about it yet you mentioned instructors can be keystone species right we can have these really powerful and disproportionate impacts on students and that's that's the beauty that's the joy of being an instructor and what makes it so fulfilling looking through your curriculum look at your classroom look at the experience that you are cultivating for your students where and when are you creating opportunities for your students to engage meaningful dialogue how can I as the instructor guide and leverage students motivation to be able to engage in deep learning process that allows them to be successful in your course and beyond I tell my students the universe is not stingy with talent it's the spread everywhere and so it is our job our responsibility to develop that talent the goal the place that we're trying to go is that quadrant of high expectations and high support and that's the place where we want to live so what does promote belonging in school the number one factor is a student's relationship with the teacher there are so so many ways that we can take action to make that happen and I apologize there was a bit of a lag with the video but this clip is taken from a course an online course that the group I'm part of at HHMI interactive has developed for inclusive teaching so hearing these different instructors teach talk about what inclusive teaching means and then reflecting on how you want to this experience to be so this is the first step really thinking about what do I want how do I create spaces for conversation in my classroom how do I want to engage with my students but then you need tools and strategies you know how do I actually put it in practice and so that's where these two programs that we will talk about today come in so there are two programs at HHMI bi-interactive program which I lead and the C which stands for science education alliance program with that Vic leads and they provide two approaches to create a more inclusive classroom bi-interactive is more focused on the lecture part of class which is a more important one no we're kidding and C is more focused on the lab part of the introductory biology experience they were both focused on introductory in biology specifically so bi-interactive provides supports educators by providing resources and professional developments of resources or anything you will use in the classroom so they're all available on the bi-interactive website if you go to bi-interactive.org there are about over 500 resources meaning videos simulations activities things that you can use in your classroom and there are activities that engage students in doing some of the things that scientists do right asking questions interpreting evidence constructing explanations the students are building their own knowledge rather than just listening to someone speak and we also provide professional development like the course I showed before for educators to to provide strategies for creating inclusive spaces in their classrooms so this is just a quote from a teacher in Mexico she says using bi-interactive resources I have seen my students become amazed recognizing the importance of scientific work want to study tuskless elephants and find a cure for cancer so we produce resources for a U.S. audience that's our primary audience but they're used internationally and most of our resources we also translate in Spanish so I'm going to show you just a little bit like a snippet what it of what it looks like to use these resources in the classroom this is another video hopefully it won't lag but it's about tuskless elephants what this teacher was talking about so I'm teaching biology so I get a video from by interactive and I'm going to show students a clip from it for over 40 years Joyce pool has been studying elephant populations in Africa she's one of the world's experts on elephant behavior and communication her work has taken her to Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique where she's working with local scientists he's the same guy anywhere on the camera traps who was in the farms I'm studying the status of the Gorongosa elephants looking at how they have and are recovering from a period of heavy poaching the scientists are monitoring a peculiar characteristic one that they've also seen in other African parks some elephant populations seem to be missing their tusks so so if you were in my class now as students I would say you know work in small groups come up with some what are some questions that you have what do you think is going on here so you can talk amongst yourselves and then tell me or you write your questions on piece of paper bring them we put them all on the board or like what kind of showed yesterday or today with the polls you use a poll to send in your questions right so because most people will have some questions after watching this clip so I'm going to show you now students these are actual questions from students not from my class another class students have a lot of questions you don't have to read them all and just showing you a lot they'll generate a lot of questions and the questions are very varied I'll talk about as questions are genetics evolution conservation so and a lot of different areas so already I've heard from my students so part of this is engaging students now students are motivated to find out more and also it's good for me as an instructor because now I know where students perspectives are what they're thinking about what their knowledge is so they're contributing their knowledge and also I don't know the answers for some of these questions so it changes the dynamics I'm not the experts who know the expert who knows everything sometimes students more know more of me more than me about some of these topics so then I may say okay is this evolution it's a good question what do we know about evolution evolution is change over time are these elephants changing so then on bio interactive there are many other activities then that we can take advantage of to to explore these questions so this is an interactive where you can look at data and there's a data set of elephants of different ages and so you can start asking questions are there differences among elephants maybe everyone based on this x or based on their age and visualize the data so students and then there are other activities you want to know more about genetics there are other activities that get into that so students are now constructing their own learning by asking these questions and analyzing data and so we know that this way of students doing asking questions and constructing their own explanation works there's a lot of evidence in science education that this is way of active learning is a much better way to learn especially for students from marginalized groups and it's also the way that teachers want to teach so when we ask this is from a survey of 500 undergraduate educators who teach introductory biology and when we ask what is the most important thing to you why do you teach so the top responses are I want to help my students learn how to learn and then almost everyone 97% says I want to develop my students critical thinking skills and I want to help my students understand how science works this is what teachers what faculty say you don't get at this if you're just talking to your students right that students have to be engaged and so then I think this is why I'm a majority of yes educators also used by interactive resources because we're providing these resources that allow them takes a long time to produce resources where you can engage students if you have to design them anyone who teaches I see it just take can eat up a lot of your time so having resources that are ready helps you achieve this so we know we did a big survey of over a thousand educators somewhere high school biology teachers some undergraduate and 79% high school biology teachers said they use by interactive resources over 60% of undergraduate educators use by interactive so there's a need for these kinds of resources and a cool thing that's happening now is these educators who are using by interactive resources and engaging students in this kind of learning are becoming agents of change so what I mean by that is yes classroom educators use these resources to create more inclusive evidence-based teaching we call them by interactive ambassadors because then they're the ones who conduct workshops and talk with other educators about how to implement this kind of teaching and that's kind of how it spreads this way of teaching so this is pretty much by interactive in a nutshell and now I'm gonna hand it over to Vick who can tell you about the C program and Vick I don't know how to introduce you all right thank you Lara um I too want oh sorry I'm Vicks of a Nathan um and I too want to take an opportunity to thank the organizers for what has been a really a journey of learning here I've also had the pleasure of working with Sehab director Cathy Takayama in the past she has always been inspiring and so it's no surprise that we have such an amazing collection of folks in this room so thank you Cathy so Lara talked about how the bio interactive program is transforming the lecture component of the US undergraduate biology classroom the undergraduate science classroom the science education alliance program or the C program is a sister program to bio interactive and we're trying to transform the lab component right so you know a common goal for both of us is trying to create spaces for rich interactions to happen between the student and the instructor right we think it's foundational for an engaging curriculum but also foundational to create a sense of belonging in that classroom and a sense of belonging in the sciences right Cathy said Ubuntu she reminded us right we are because we belong and so the approach that the science education oh sorry the approach that the science education alliance is taking to achieve this goal is to transform the traditional lab course into a real research environment and so to sort of walk you through why we've taken this approach I'm going to show you what a typical lab course looks like you're probably familiar with this and let us contrast that with what it's like for an undergraduate student to learn science through authentic research and for the purposes of this talk we'll focus on the interactions that happen between the instructor and the student and so I'll start with the traditional lab in the US we call these labs canned labs like a can of tuna you know what's inside you know what it looks like you know what it tastes like right and so the instructor knows exactly how the experiment is going to go right and so when they teach their students they're able to provide very clear guidance right here's your protocol here's how you'll do it and if you do it right here's the result that you would get right now it's the students then they get a chance to try their hands at the protocols get a result then they turn that result back into the instructor who looks at it and says oh you didn't do it quite right or you did it great and then they give you a grade and they hand it back to you so there is somewhat of a two-way communication here but it's only one at a time right it's fairly structured it's rigid and really somewhat transactional between them let's explore what happens what it looks like when a student gets student gets to learn science by doing research right and so it starts off pretty much the same the instructor still has to provide the protocol and explain to the students how they need to do it but as they provide the students this protocol they also provide context for the student right so they tell the students you're doing this because we don't understand this thing in science and your bit of data is going to contribute towards this so be thoughtful about how you do the experiment because other scientists are going to be looking and trying to understand it right make sure you keep good records of it and so the student is still going to be thoughtful about their experiment regardless right it still matters for a grade but now that slight very slight shift in framing changes the experience for the student because they're also thoughtful about it because they're contributing to a scientific endeavor they're actually now there's a burgeoning sense that you belong or you're part of something bigger than that classroom right so right off the bat there's a slight change in framing for the students okay so then the students go ahead and stop producing results and this is real research we don't really know what the outcome should be and you all do research or many of you sorry do research and so you know that the results are almost never black or white they're never clear cut right they're always ambiguous as scientists our job is to sort of look for clues to decipher that ambiguous results so we can move their research forward but students don't know this to be the nature of science that's not how science education has been for them it's always clear cut so in this space it's actually really hard for them to contend with an ambiguous result right you'll hear them say things like the experiment failed or worse they failed right okay but in this space of ambiguous results is where things really start to shift between the traditional lab and the research based classroom right right off the bat when the student has this ambiguous result the instructor and student now find themselves on the same side right because they kind of have to figure this out in order to take the next step i can't just give you a grade for this right and so as the instructor and students are assessing and discussing that result we see like magic happen right there's a whole suite of interactions that sort of blossom from that space you can put them into two buckets at the top we have what we call conceptual facilitation instructors really trying to help the student figure out what's going on right so they might say things like well let's let's look at the procedures maybe you made a mistake maybe i gave you the wrong materials let's look at that they pull in at the students and say well if many other students are using this we can use that as data points right and they're modeling scientific thinking right then then right the student is getting real-time feedback as that is happening it's a conversation that they're having about that result at that same time there's this whole bottom set of interactions that are happening we call this sort of emotional facilitation right you all know what it's like to get a bad result or an ambiguous result right so these students feel deflated right they they have now lost some confidence in their own ability to do this and so these instructors naturally find themselves saying things like don't worry i've been doing this for 20 years and i make the same mistakes right or you know the first part of your experiment looks really good right just apply that same process to the rest of it i'm sure we'll figure this out right so there's some emotional facilitation going on in that classroom already and you know doesn't matter how small the result is once you've gone through that process and worked hard at it i mean you clone a plasmid and it finally works if you struggle this genuine joy that is that is shared both by the instructor and student right and so i hope you can see that just by engaging in real research we can actually start to change the dynamics the interactions between the instructor and the student right we go from a somewhat rigid transactional interaction to one that is rich with facilitation right and this changes the relationship between the instructor and the student it's not just an expert and a novice right now there's a mentor and mentee in that classroom and so when we look at the experience for students and we measure things that are known to influence a student's decision of whether or not to stay in the sciences whether they have ownership of what they're learning self efficacy is their belief in their ability to actually be a scientist whether they identify as a scientist these are all factors that we know will influence a student's decision of whether or not to stay in the sciences and so we see that students that participate in this research based curriculum have higher score higher in these categories than students who take the traditional lab and what's pretty amazing here is we see no differences anymore between the student demographics right male and female peer non peer first generation continuing education now you've even the playing field for students because they work together towards success instead of deciding whether or not you're successful right off the bat now if Catherine Ignacio from this morning was here she's like Vic this is just rational data where's that emotional piece are we talking about a sense of belonging right and so here here's that piece so we bring students in to share their results and so this is a first year student at a small community college in Texas where there's no research on campus except this course and after she presented her data she goes off script right and let's listen to her when I first started in the biotechnology program it was a class to get to another class to get to another class right a grade and maybe you guys felt the same way at first but I will tell you the very first day that changed I knew I would love this I had the most dorky smile on my face um and so going through the discovery process was really uh empowering for me um and one day our professor dropped the word scientists right and I think Vic may have mentioned something like this uh you know our work I guess what I'm trying to say is that day made me realize that what we're doing here is important but my program my research our research isn't any important more important than your research or your research or your research while some of the projects may be more uh immediately impactful um I just want you guys to know that I'm really proud to be a part of this community and I hope that you guys are proud to be labeled as scientists um and I'm really excited to add our data point of Magallion to a list of millions and billions or 5 000 projects um so that we can at at some point use all this data and progress this field right and so you know this student Danielle she feels like a scientist right she has south efficacy she feels like she belongs to that community I get emotional whatever I hear speaking I've seen this video a hundred times um but Ubuntu we are because we belong right it's right there in her in her own words okay so we know this is impactful for students right but we also know we've also learned that it's impactful for the educators right Lara mentioned this we've surveyed our instructors too who teach the lab components they're often the same people right and we ask them what do you want to be for your student what are important roles that you want to embody for your students and they say such wonderful things right I want to be their mentor I want to be their collaborator I want to be their motivator I want to be their advocate right all these beautiful things and then we think about that two different classroom environments it's really hard you can but it's really hard for these sort of this roles to emerge naturally in that fairly transactional interaction that you have with your student but you put ambiguity and authentic research in the classroom and it emerges naturally we provide no professional development for our teachers to teach we just give them the space to work with their students and now that they can they can fulfill this roles and they find this for themselves a professional rewarding way to teach right so one of this one came in recently an educator was retiring and they sent an email and said that the ability to teach this way was the pinnacle of their academic career okay so the question then is how do we transform the undergraduate teaching lab into a real research environment right so you all know research labs to be sort of tucked away small groups led by a principal investigator some staff scientist maybe some postdocs maybe some graduate students right undergraduate students unless it's sort of an outreach or a summer internship I'm not part of this equation we don't have capacity for them for all of them in our classrooms right right so the undergraduate students in fact the instructors who teach undergraduate students are separated at institutions of higher education they are in a different bucket everyone else learns science by doing science undergraduate students and the instructors who are primarily undergraduate teaching instructors are sort of separated right there at the institutions of higher education and so here's where the science education alliance sits we sort of act as the connective tissue between the research lab and the teaching lab right so we work closely with research scientists develop protocols and resources and then we turn that around and we work with these instructors these educators for all like us at one point took a bachelor's in science or a master's in science or a PhD or a postdoc we did it because we love science and we went into teaching because we love teaching right so these guys are really primed to do it so we pivot we work with them and support them to use these resources and do research with their students as they produce results we bring those we help curate that data we bring them together to discuss it and then they feed it back into the research lab they take that data they innovate and then they push the data back into the classroom and then it keeps going back and fall right so this program was started about 15 years ago it's a program in discovering new viruses that infect bacteria bacteria phages so this program is called seed phages in the 15 years these undergraduate students and their instructors have built what is now the largest virus archive in the world and there are viruses today that are in patients who are dying from anti sorry antibiotic resistant infections right so it's not just beneficial for undergraduates it's not just beneficial for the educators it's also beneficial for science when we can expand the research ecosystem to be inclusive of students and because of this buy-in we've been able to grow the program you know we are trying to be a pilot to show what this can look like right now we have about 400 educators across 200 colleges and universities in the US from some of our biggest research universities to some of our smallest community colleges in the US and as Lara mentioned what's really amazing that we that we didn't really plan for is that these educators are now the ones that are championing this work they're the ones going out and spreading this form of teaching and so for HHMI through the bio interactive and the C programs you know we are trying to transform the lecture and lab the introductory science courses to uplift the student voice and to center the student experience and we've been able to make you know broad and I think deep impact by supporting these educators as community so that they can lean on each other they feel part of the scientific ecosystem and we also provide them with high quality teaching resources so that they can focus on mentoring their students through the process of science and share with them the thrill of discovery why we all do science right we write so bio interactive and C have been staying in our separate lanes working in the lecture and lab but now we're sort of integrating our approaches to combine those spaces and approaches for what we think would be fairly transformative for US undergraduate science education and so with that I'll stop and thank you all for your time Arikathar as you all know so Vic has been working at Howard Hughes medical institute and and he has a very interesting and exciting background so like so he majored in biochemistry and bio biology from the University of Oxford and Harvard University and so he has been using his research to inspire college students then demonstrating his serious commitment to a better science of education and so this is yeah so his efforts with this program have enabled over 200 most visually across the U.S. and from large to reading but researching to further make up and do right to stop mentoring that increases both so at first actually so highly talking about this program last year I thought and so so we thought thinking about how can we translate this to your practice so we should always and so we have some potential ideas in GNA projects and so on to engage not the college students themselves so with that I think I'd like to open the floor I thought thank you very much for two amazing talks I want to build the tree right off for what Amy said and ask so I see from your website you have a Spanish version of bio interactive and I wonder whether it might be or how feasible you think it might be to translate it into Japanese and OIST is a great place you have an innovative group like the innovation group we have translators programmers so I think it could be possible yeah so we have no it's occasionally we get requests for translating and it's very easy for us to so all everything we produce is for free it's creative comments anyone can take our resources and modify them except for the films those are the harder ones but everything else is so for us it's just a matter of partnering because we it's work right to translate things and but if yeah if we find partners we're interested in translating our resources it's yeah it's not hard to do so if I may kind of try to lift this above the classroom and into more generally science communication because I see a lot of the kind of the principles driving this change within the classroom could also probably be used as tools to make science communication more generally more inclusive so inviting general audiences to kind of take on the role as scientists and kind of embrace that ambiguity that is in science because I think a lot a lot of the time in in kind of general audience science communication it's very much an expert talking to to to to the people and it's very very transactional and of course you don't see the audience but nevertheless the feeling is still the same that there are these experts in institutions and they do some special things and then suddenly science but as I'm wondering there is always a risk when you make things more dialogic or more less transactional that and you allow for this ambiguity that there's you know there can be faulty assumptions kind of arising and fact checking the general audience is a lot more difficult than doing in the classroom where you have an interaction with with students directly so I kind of just wanted to kind of peek out your your your thoughts on taking these principles and applying them more broadly to to the world of science outside of the institutions we have a lot to say about this but why don't you go first Laura well I think it's part of the the we're part of a department that is actually thinking a lot about that because there are programs at HHMI that support scientists at different stages of their careers and now there's a realization of the importance of scientists to engage with communities but not again as you said and I think our vice president will say don't drop a scientist like in any community and say here I'm going to tell you all this stuff but really developing scientists within their communities and so that they can become advocates for science so I think that that's definitely I think after the pandemic there has been a realization of how the disconnect between you know what scientists think people know about science versus the reality and so an understanding that yeah we have as scientists we have to be part of our communities and so there are programs that are now being developed but I think yeah everyone should be a part of that conversation because it's really important now yeah and I'll just add and say you know this notion of everyone is a scientist is not always very helpful because then you just then you can make up your own hypothesis and suddenly that's true and that's what we see happening around right and this is why this type of education I think is so valuable as an introductory course right because the students spend an entire year doing this right and at the end of it they're actually published a short manuscript I mean they're doing this I mean every sentence counts how you phrase it the instructor's like that's that's too ambiguous no one's going to understand that is that true can we stand behind it and so when they leave that classroom they understand what it means to look at what something that science says right we always say we're 98 confident in it for them it means you don't know what you're talking about it could be something else right but we understand what it means and it's really hard to teach someone that right it's something you experience and then understand and so I think you know as an introductory course it could have a profound effect and I think place more students more scientists in communities thank you very much thanks for coming on that way it's great to have you here really enjoyed it anecdotally biology 101 you got the aspiring scientist sitting up front and everybody else in the back who's just fulfilling a science requirement so what is your does this hold for both groups or does that change your methodology how do you approach that when you have vastly different levels of motivation thank you and I teach non majors so every student at the beginning of the year I do a survey why are you in this class they'll say I have to take this class I don't like science science has no impact on my life so every single student and I don't want them to change like oh you have to be a scientist because I think we need historians we need but I my goal always when I teach is to understand how science can be useful to you and can be empowering both to help you make decisions about you know your health or the health of our planet but also from to protect you from a lot of bad information so I tried to connect and that's why the two-way communication is really important because I have to understand what students are interested in what motivates them so that's why you need to you need to know your students as an educator you need to have conversations see what questions they have and then try to connect science right now we're not and I think it's important also for students who want to pursue science if you don't see the connections and it's just you know you have to memorize all these facts even the most motivated students might need Babu's interest do you have there's another component that you get from this form of education that I think can can change how a student experiences the classroom and so we know that you know in in the US these small colleges are called community colleges because they serve local students they're two-year colleges usually they're using it as a stepping stone they call community colleges but usually they are commuter students they're driving in and out there's no real community like a foyer institution and our instructors tell us that through an experience like this where they're doing research collaboratively it's the first time that their students have community in higher education and so I think the yeah the benefits are are broad regardless of who the students are so yeah for the same time Chinese that's the thing the inspirational lectures get big and far